Review | ‘Indecent’ confronts the history of Jewish theatre with style and verve

Mirvish and Studio 180’s “Indecent” is anything but.

Brought to life with gentleness by director Joel Greenberg, Paula Vogel’s tribute to theatre-making has all the trappings of a world-class love story. Languages intersect, memories collide, bodies tangle.

But if it’s a love story, it’s a haunted one, a play-within-a-play that spirals in on itself like a ravenous snake.

“Indecent” opens with small mountains of ash falling from the sleeves of a dusty theatre troupe. Lemml, the troupe’s stage manager (played by a perfectly cast Matt Baram), wants to tell us the story of a play that changed his life: “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch.

It’s 1906 and Asch, played with a fitting dash of intellectual aloofness by Jonathan Gould, has written a play about women in love — they even kiss onstage — and Lemml is smitten by the girls’ tenderness. The girls in question are Rifkele, played by a sweet Jessica Greenberg, and Manke, acted with subtle compassion by a fiery Tracy Michailidis.

“God of Vengeance” has great success in Europe and even in its Yiddish premiere in New York City. But then things get sticky; a producer (Dov Mickelson) changes the script, grinding the Sapphic love story down to its bones and stripping the play of its iconic “rain scene” between Manke and Rifkele. Chana, who played Rifkele in Europe, cannot master the play’s English translation and so is recast with an American gentile named Virgina who, though earnest, can’t understand the play’s layers of Jewishness and lesbianism (in an amusing double-casting prescribed by Vogel, Chana and Virgina are both played by Greenberg).

Back home in Europe, attitudes toward Jews are getting worse and worse, and Asch, woefully depressed, removes himself from his play’s daily operations — even when the American authorities arrest the cast and producer for acts of obscenity when the play opens.

“Indecent” claws through a century of history in search of precious pearls of truth — and it finds them buried in ash.

A sequence detailing the Holocaust teems with pain, studded with yellow Stars of David and nervous queues toward uncertain futures. Vogel’s play ingeniously balances moments of immeasurable sorrow with fleeting images of true joy amongst Jews and, as such, the play’s pacing is immaculate.

Greenberg follows Vogel’s instructions masterfully and his take on “Indecent” falls neatly into the footsteps of the 2017 Broadway production — visually, they’re close to identical, right down to the font used for projections — but it’s so effective one almost doesn’t mind.

This is a play with music and a rapturous one: text and instrumentation never overshadow one another. The music almost feels like a character in the play. And the words of the play are symphonic and rich, themselves an instrument in the work’s score.

Three musicians accompany the action of “Indecent” — Laetitia Francoz-Lévesque on violin, Emilyn Stam on accordion and John David Williams on clarinet — and they’re as good actors as they are instrumentalists. The core group of actors is also tasked with singing and, for the most part, they’re up to the task; while the singing isn’t perfect, it’s not meant to be. It is instead in resonance with the clumsy-on-purpose timbre of the “Indecent” esthetic.

On the technical side of things, Ken Mackenzie’s set is spare and efficient, really just a few chairs and a small platform. Chynah Philadelphia’s props, old-fashioned suitcases and the like, complement Mackenzie’s wood-panelled playing space well. Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design fosters valuable balance between music and prose, and Kimberley Purtell’s lighting suggests volatile changes in mood with stylish verve. Kudos, too, to dialect coach Julia Lenardon; a veritable smorgasbord of accents emerges during the play and the actors navigate those changes with grace.

In my interview with Paula Vogel, she said she saw the most of herself in Lemml, the sweet stage manager infatuated beyond reprieve with Asch’s play. And in this production, that soft spot for Lemml is the play’s biggest asset. Baram’s role is not easy, with its double-duty MO of naivety and bittersweet nostalgia, and Baram plays it simply and perfectly. Vogel’s love for the character shines through Baram; and Lemml, embodying the wordless magic of theatre-making, is in turn an unspeakably lovable narrator.

There aren’t too many plays like “Indecent”: plays-within-plays that don’t feel cheesy, plays about Jews that don’t linger in the trenches of generational trauma, plays with music that don’t feel like cheap musicals. While “God of Vengeance” might have been reviled in its Broadway run, demonized for its portrayal of lesbianism, exiled for its unabashed Jewishness, it certainly was not obscene, unwatchable or “indecent.”

Studio 180’s take on Paula Vogel’s gorgeous play corrects the record, and it does so with heart and style: go.

Indecent

Written by Paula Vogel. Directed by Joel Greenberg. At the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St., until Nov. 6. mirvish.com or 1-800-461-3333

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